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Plato Or Schopenhauer? I Plato or Schopenhauer? All beautiful things, the Greek philosopher Plotinus wrote in the third century a.d., produce “awe and a shock of delight, passionate longing, love and a shudder of rapture.” All beautiful things: natural objects and works of art, bodies and souls, ways of life, knowledge, virtue, and much else besides. Our time, by contrast, has confined such feel­ ings to everyday life. It has drawn a heavy curtain between them and the true pleasures of art, which ordinary people, as Ortega y Gasset charged in 1925, are incapable of experiencing: “To the majority of people aesthetic pleasure means a state of mind which is essentially indistinguishable from their ordinary behavior. As they have never practiced any other attitude but the practical one in which a man’s feelings are aroused and he is emotionally involved, a work that does not invite sentimental intervention leaves them without a cue”; ordi­ nary people wallow in emotions not only different “from true artistic pleasure, but . incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper.” Philosophy, too, has abandoned Plotinus’s broad vision. Suspicious of passion, it limited itself to a kind of beauty to which desire seemed inappropriate—the beauty in great art and the wonders of nature, concentrated in museums and national parks. And so the beauty that mattered to philosophy, to criticism, and often to the arts themselves, if it mattered at all, was separated from the beauty that mattered to the rest of the world, to whom it seemed irrelevant and empty: the higher and more refined its pleasures, the less like pleasures they seemed. How did that happen? Is it purification or impoverishment? And what, if anything, are we—philosophers, critics, historians, the “edu­ cated” public that looks down on the “masses,” and the masses them­ selves, who, when they bother to think about any of this, make fun of the educated—to do about it? Plotinus’s words were a conscious echo of Plato’s description of a man who sees a beautiful boy for the first time. Such a man, Plato writes in the Phaedrus, fi rst shudders in cold fear . and gazes at the boy with reverence, as if he were a god. But gradually his trembling gives way to a strange feverish sweat, stoked by the stream of beauty pouring into him through his eyes and feeding the growth of his soul’s wings. He cares for nothing else. Mother, brothers or friends mean nothing to him. He gladly neglects every­ thing else that concerns him; losing it all would make no difference to him if only it were for the boy’s sake. Plato and the ancients were not afraid of the risky language of passion because they thought that beauty, even the beauty of lowly objects, can gradually inspire a longing for goodness and truth. In the Sympo­ sium, Plato describes a long process that leads from the love of a single individual to a life governed by the love of all the beauty of the world, which is for him the life of philosophy itself. Passion in pursuing that life, its wisdom and virtue, and everything that leads to them, is just what the ancients encouraged and valued, and the pleasures they promised in return were vivid and intense. 2 Chapter I Th e fiery reaction to beauty Plato and Plotinus describe was still comprehensible to lovers of beauty and art like John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth century, but beauty had long ago ceased to go hand in hand with wisdom and goodness; it had eventually come to be, as it is to most of the world today, largely irrelevant and often opposed to them. Even Ruskin, the most moralizing of modern aestheticians, had to acknowledge the breach between beauty and morality, and his advice to painters reveals the conflict he faced: “Does a man die at your feet—your business is not to help him, but to note the colour of his lips. Not a specially religious or spiritual business this, it might appear.” And so it did. Mistrustful of passion, the twentieth century gradu­ ally came to doubt beauty itself. The contrast between helping the suffering and painting them, between fighting for them and writing about them, became starker and deeper. Wary of the ability of art to transmute the greatest horrors into objects of beauty, philosophy disavowed it and relegated the beauty of human beings and ordinary things, inseparable as it is from yearning and from the body, to biol­ ogy and psychology, to fashion, advertising, and marketing. It pre­ served the beauty of art and its equivocal satisfactions as its rightful subjects only by means of thinking of them as “aesthetic,” a category that obliterated the vision that had once kindled Plato’s imaginat ion. The aesthetic made it possible to isolate the beautiful from all the sensual, practical, and ethical issues that were the center of Plato’s concern. The concept itself is part of the legacy of Immanuel Kant, who established the modern fi eld of Aesthetics in the late eighteenth century. In an enigmatic formulation whose infl uence nevertheless permeates our attitude toward the arts and, as we shall see, count­ less aspects of everyday life, Kant disavowed the ancients. Beauty, he claimed, is manifested only through a contemplation of nature or art that produces “a satisfaction without any interest.” Th e pleasure (“satisfaction”) we find in beautiful things is completely independent of their relations to the rest of the world—of their uses and eff ects. We have no interest in possessing them or in their consequences for ourselves or others. It is a pleasure bereft of desire. Plato or Schopenhauer? 3 The beautiful is according to Kant different from both the “agree­ able” and the good. The agreeable is anything that we like and enjoy in the most everyday sense of the word—strawberry ice cream, the smell of jasmine, silk, a large house or a good meal and perhaps canary wine (Kant’s own example) to go with it. The pleasure such things give spurs the desire to possess them; we want them to continue to be, along with other things like them, available to us. That is, Kant says, to have a serious interest “in their existence.” It is an attitude we also have toward good things—things that are either useful or morally valuable. Useful things are those that lead to an agreeable end—an ice-cream maker, for instance, if I like ice cream—and I have an in­ terest in their existence, since I desire to possess the ends to which they are the means. Morally valuable things, finally, are valuable in themselves, things we want to be the case for their own sake—which is also to have an interest in their existence. But no such interest enters when we are concerned with the beauty of something: “If the question,” Kant writes, “is whether something is beautiful, one does not want to know whether there is anything that is or that could be at stake, for us or for someone else, in the existence of the thing, but rather how we judge it in mere contemplation.” Is such a thing pleas­ ant to have? Is it good for us to have it? Is it good that it exists? Does it exist in the first place or is it a figment of my imagination? None of that matters. A palace can be beautiful despite being ostentatious, useless, and the product of oppression. If I want to own a painting because I find it beautiful or praise a novel because of its moral point of view, my judgement is undermined: Everyone must admit that a judgment about beauty in which there is mixed the least interest is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing, but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in matters of taste. Aesthetic pleasure is a pleasure we take in things just as they stand before us, without regard to their effects on our sensual, practical, 4 Chapter I or moral concerns. Moreover, beauty is not a feature of things them­ selves: the judgment of taste—“This is beautiful”—does not so much describe its object as it reports the feeling of pleasure we are experi­ encing. The judgment of taste, he writes, is made only on the basis of “the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, by means of which nothing at all in the object is designated, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation.” Kant’s views on the nature of beauty and art and their relationship to the rest of life are immensely complex. Although he dissociated beauty from desire, he did not himself limit it to the arts; the tradi­ tion that followed him, though, emphasized not only what has come to be known as the “disinterestedness” of beauty but, even more, the “autonomy” of art. Neither beauty nor art bears (or should bear) any relation to the everyday world of desires, and both move us (or should move us) as nothing else in that world does. Long before Modernism taught us to prize the difficult, the discomforting, and the edifying instead of the lovely or the attractive, the beauty that was important to philosophy had already been transformed from the spark of desire to the surest means of its quenching. For Arthur Schopenhauer in the mid-nineteenth century, desire can never be fully satisfied; no matter what we accomplish, we want more, our ultimate goal always hover­ ing, like Tan talus’s fruit, just beyond our reach.
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